Rachel Meade Smith has many titles—writer, editor, researcher, job fairy, textile artist, oral historian, civic designer… Her prolific multi-disciplinary practice coalesces around seeing the extraordinary within the ordinary, the power of knowledge sharing, and “repair” as both mantra and material practice.

This conversation will explore her thoughts around the mending mindset and rethinking what novelty can be. What do work and art look like when focused on searching, gathering, recording, reconstructing, and renaming the old until it is undeniably new?

Rachel Meade Smith is a writer, editor, artist, and educator. Currently, she writes and edits for Civilla, a civic design studio working to fix the social safety net, helps people find good work through her weekly newsletter Words of Mouth, and co-leads Repair Shop, a public education project intent on making repair skills accessible and commonplace.

Megumi Shauna Arai is an artist based in New York City. Investigating literal and metaphorical borders and the notion of belonging, her work sits at the intersection of textile and painting. Through the language of abstraction, by way of the physical process of folding and layering, her work focuses on points of encounter, betweenness as a practice of embodiment, and the material and immaterial as interconnected. Her work has been shown at LongHouse Reserve, Bridget Donahue Gallery, Management Gallery, Object & Thing at Madoo, Stone Barns Center, The Noyes House with Blum & Poe, Mendes Wood DM and Object & Thing, Wing Luke Museum and Jacob Lawrence Gallery. Recent residencies include Headlands Center for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Library. Alternative pedagogy collaboration includes Field Meridians, an art-based urban ecology curriculum in Central Brooklyn and The Mothership, an eco-feminist art and ecology center founded by Yto Barrada in Tangier, Morocco. She is represented by Abby Bangser, founder of Object & Thing.

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